The Lion in Autumn Read online

  But perhaps the most logical theory was the most mundane. After the ‘99 season, longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky had retired. If nothing else, the loss of a man who had been at Paterno’s side for thirty-one seasons prompted a major shift in staff responsibilities.

  Paterno responded to Sandusky’s departure somewhat oddly, eliminating the coordinator titles. He named defensive backs coach Tom Bradley the “coach in charge of defense.” He gave Ganter the same distinction with the offense, in addition to an “assistant head coach” designation. Also, the coach’s thirty-five-year-old son, Jay Paterno, previously the tight-ends coach, took charge of the quarterbacks before the 2000 season and was handed additional play-calling responsibilities. As for his own role, Paterno reconsolidated some of the offensive duties he had grudgingly yielded.

  When those moves resulted in losing seasons in 2000, 2001, and 2003, the offensive staff became the focus of discontent. Even as Paterno prepared to run his 2004 squad through spring drills, fans were griping about the offense on the local radio sports-talk station, 970-AM, and in letters to the Centre Daily Times and student-run Daily Collegian.

  Jay Paterno became a lightning rod for much of that dissatisfaction. The program’s critics, especially those reluctant to criticize Paterno, blamed his son for many of the difficulties—poor quarterbacking, subpar recruiting, dismal play-calling.

  An online poll conducted among visitors to PSU Playbook, a Web site for Nittany Lions fans, posed this question: “Is Jay Paterno the biggest obstacle Penn State faces?” There were 249 votes: Eighty-five percent said yes, fifteen percent said no. The respondents’ biggest fear was that Paterno was grooming his son, who had been a walk-on quarterback at Penn State and later an assistant at James Madison, Virginia, and Connecticut, as his successor.

  “A lot of people have said I’ve been hanging around long enough so that I can turn the job over to Jay,” Paterno would say. “That’s not fair to Jay and it put a lot of heat on him, I think unfairly. It’s awfully tough to have your kid follow you. A couple of guys have tried that and it hasn’t worked that well. If, when the time comes, they want to consider him, that’s one thing. But it’s awfully tough.”

  Paterno was extremely loyal to his entire staff. Being a Penn State football assistant was practically a lifetime job. Sandusky had worked with him for thirty-one years, Ganter thirty, Dick Anderson twenty-five.

  “You have to look at the track record of this place,” Paterno said. “We don’t go jumping around, getting rid of people, bringing people in . . . it’s just not my style.”

  That wasn’t to say there were no internecine staff disputes. Conflicts between strong-willed men were inevitable, even in Happy Valley. Paterno’s nature was to nag, prod, and interfere. As a young aide to Engle, he had precipitated many arguments himself. “At meetings,” he said of those early days, “I was a damn loudmouth.”

  But while two coaches jawing at each other on the sideline during a 10–2 season might appear merely to be a difference of opinion, it was seen as a deep-rooted problem after losing records in three of the last four years. Fans and sportswriters had begun to note how often Penn State coaches openly disagreed. Ganter and Jay Paterno frequently appeared to be at odds on play calls. Communication—from the coaches’ box, to the sideline, to the huddle—often broke down, causing on-the-field confusion and delay-of-game penalties.

  “Paterno says he wants another national championship run,” wrote Neil Rudel in the Altoona Mirror. “Most fans would settle for getting the field-goal unit out without having to waste a time-out.”

  Despite being constantly in the TV cameras’ focus, Paterno himself often jumped on assistants himself during games. Afterward he would make excuses. And even though Paterno saw Robinson as one of the nation’s best players, the staff couldn’t seem to agree on a consistent role for him.

  So Penn State supporters constantly called for another staff shakeup. And whether it was as a response to that outcry or not, Paterno eventually gave it to them.

  On February 17, in a vaguely worded athletic-department news release, it was revealed that Ganter was being moved to a new administrative position, associate director for football operations. Galen Hall, 61, a onetime Penn State quarterback when Paterno was Engle’s quarterbacks coach, would be brought in to take his place for the 2004 season.

  In addition, Mike McQueary, another ex-Lions quarterback who recently had been a graduate assistant, would now coach the maligned wide receivers. He replaced Kenny Carter, whose departure to become Vanderbilt’s running backs coach was widely seen as a bone to the program’s critics. McQueary also would become the recruiting coordinator, a role previously held by Jay Paterno.

  It was a lot to digest. Ganter, whose son was currently one of Penn State’s backup quarterbacks, and whose wife, Karen, had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 2002, had long been seen as Paterno’s successor. Had he been sacrificed to the team’s offensive problems? Or did the move make sense? Whatever the answer, his job shift further obscured Penn State’s post-Paterno future. If Ganter, the most obvious choice, wasn’t going to be the Nittany Lions’ next coach, who was?

  At a February 18 news conference, Curley indicated that the former assistant coach would help ease his growing workload, supervising camps and clinics and acting as a marketing liaison. Ganter was close enough to the coach that he could handle a lot of his more personal responsibilities, become an intermediary between Paterno and his ex-players.

  “I knew the job was good for Penn State football, but I didn’t know if it was good for Frannie. Frannie was the only guy who could make that decision,” Paterno would explain. “We certainly didn’t want to push him into it in any way, even though in the back of my mind I felt this was something that would be helpful to the whole program. . . . It’s going to be kind of strange not being down on the sideline arguing with him every once in a while.”

  In what sounded like an indictment of the old staff, Ganter said, “We agonize over game plans, down and distance and tendencies, and all of that kind of us stuff. [Hall] is a terrific game coach. . . . [He is] a guy who can see what’s happening quickly and make game adjustments as the game is going on.”

  Hall’s hiring as offensive coordinator—though technically he was “running-backs coach/in charge of offense”—was equally intriguing. His résumé included both Penn State credentials and success as an offensive architect elsewhere. But it also contained a scandal, something squeaky-clean Penn State typically shunned.

  Hall had been the offensive coordinator on a pair of national-champion Oklahoma teams in the 1970s and later was a successful head coach at Florida. He had since worked in virtually every professional league—the NFL (with the Dallas Cowboys as running-backs coach in 2002), NFL Europe, the XFL, and the Arena Football League.

  In 1989, however, Hall had resigned at Florida after admitting he had violated NCAA rules by supplementing the pay of two assistant coaches by $22,000 and by arranging transportation to court for a player so that the athlete could face child-support charges.

  Already, early in the spring, questions were raised about how Hall and Jay Paterno would divvy up the signal calling. Could a new, strong-willed coach with so much experience peacefully coexist with the boss’s son?

  “Jay will call certain plays in certain situations, and Galen will call most of the game with some input from [offensive-line coach] Dick Anderson,” Paterno said. “When we get into certain situations, Galen turns it over to Jay and vice versa.”

  If that weren’t unwieldy enough, the elder Paterno would be reinserting himself more forcefully into the play-calling process. And, of course, he would retain veto power over anything in the game plans Hall and his son devised.

  “I don’t care if God were making the calls, I would have a couple disagreements with Him,” Paterno said.

  The revamped staff seemed to catch Paterno’s fever. They attacked their spring duties with zest.

  “It seems like we h
ave a rookie coaching staff,” said E. Z. Smith. “They’re hungry. They want to win. They’re eager to teach us. Everybody has enthusiasm. Nobody is out there just going through the motions.”

  That included Paterno himself, who at one point in the spring became a victim of his own renewed focus on discipline.

  The large S in the middle of the team’s locker-room carpet has traditionally been off-limits. Anyone who stepped on it had to do ten push-ups. One day in the spring, during another impassioned speech, Paterno inadvertently tread on it three times.

  “Instead of having him do thirty push-ups, we made a deal and let him do thirty sit-ups. He did them in front of the whole squad,” said E. Z. Smith. “When you have a coach who is seventy-plus years old and won’t take a shortcut, what kind of excuse do we have? We don’t have any ground to stand on if he’s not taking a shortcut.”

  CHAPTER 2

  CENTURIES AGO, in the broad valley now dominated by the campus of Pennsylvania State University, the Susquehannock Indians named the mountain that rolled so gently across the southern horizon Nita-Nee—barrier against the elements.

  For Penn State, a rural agricultural college transformed by football and postwar demographics into a forty-two-thousand-student megaversity, Mount Nittany, which lent its name to the school’s athletic teams, has remained both a practical and a symbolic great wall. Two thousand feet high, it frequently shields State College and neighboring hamlets from harsh storms. More significantly, though, it separates the uncertain world beyond from a place that those here call, without a trace of irony, Happy Valley.

  The image of Happy Valley as a Brigadoon in the hilly heart of Pennsylvania was enhanced by its physical and cultural isolation. “To the kids that come to school here,” said Gary Grey, an ex–Penn State linebacker and now a visiting business professor, “this is an out-of-the-way Disneyland.” It’s as if on arrival, students and professors squeezed through a crack in the natural universe, emerging into a locale as pure and pristine as it was picturesque. The problems of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg were too remote to matter. There was no crime or grime in Happy Valley, no corruption or cynicism.

  Actually, until the middle of the nineteenth century, there was nothing much at all in Happy Valley but a few farms and a foundry. It wasn’t until the tumultuous years before the Civil War, when the concept of land-grant learning institutions began to take shape, that this pastoral locale started its slow transformation into the university town where a man named Joe Paterno eventually would plant himself.

  The story of Penn State began in the 1850s when America, founded by a learned elite in the cities and towns along its Atlantic coast, was developing a more democratic character as it expanded relentlessly westward. The frontiersmen and farmers populating the vast new territories were confronted constantly by vexing challenges. Soil needed to be replenished. Rivers needed to be bridged. Children needed to be educated. The private colleges of the East, which produced classically trained aristocrats fluent in Latin and Greek, offered little practical help with their daily problems.

  According to Michael Bezilla, author of Penn State: An Illustrated History, the “elitist character [of schools like Harvard and Yale] clashed with the democratic values of the young republic.” That split generated a movement to establish schools where agriculture and the technical sciences would be emphasized.

  In 1855, Pennsylvania established the Farmers High School in remote Centre County, where the Nittany and Penn valleys converged. A local farmer, James Irvin, donated the two hundred acres. His land was ideal for agricultural work and studies, since most of its trees already had been cleared to feed the nearby Centre Furnace.

  Even for the sons of farmers, Centre County was an isolated setting. The school was surrounded by Allegheny Mountain peaks and forests thick with maple, beech, ash, and hemlocks, and the nearest rail station was twenty-two miles away. Many students who journeyed there faced long stagecoach trips to the school after disembarking from trains in nearby towns. (Even three quarters of a century later, the college’s president, Edwin Sparks, called the location “equally inaccessible from all parts of the state.” And well into the 1990s, long-distance travelers to State College had to fly into Harrisburg and then journey ninety miles northward along a mountainous, two-lane road.) The site’s primary benefit, as far as anyone could tell initially, was that it was situated near Pennsylvania’s geographical center.

  In 1857, Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont introduced legislation to create a nationwide system of rural colleges. Under his proposal, the schools would be endowed by revenue from the federal government’s sale of western land. To provide settings for these institutions, states would be granted thirty thousand acres for each of their U.S. senators and congressmen.

  While the measure passed initially, it eventually was vetoed by President James Buchanan. A Pennsylvania Democrat, Buchanan was beholden to the South, where the land-grant system was seen as an overextension of federal power. The measure languished in the overheated, pre–Civil War political climate until, in 1862, with the hostilities under way and the South seceded, it was passed and signed by President Lincoln.

  Pennsylvania’s legislature designated the Farmers High School as the state’s land-grant institution. Soon renamed the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania, it grew, slowly but steadily, through the decades—eventually accepting women in 1872. In 1874 its name was changed again, to the Pennsylvania State College.

  There was little time for sports in the intensely structured life of work and study in that early era of Penn State history. Devotees of certain athletic activities, such as the cricket-loving students from the Philadelphia area, played among themselves when opportunities arose. School-sponsored athletics did not yet exist, and various social clubs and extracurricular organizations arose to fill the need.

  Sometime in the 1880s, a group of Penn State students formed a football club. The new sport, a rough-and-tumble hybrid of soccer and rugby, had spread west from the East Coast’s private institutions, where it had first gained popularity. Penn State’s club was led by a student-captain, George Linsz, because paid coaches were considered a violation of the prevailing amateur standards. On November 5, 1887, the football club played its initial game, at Bucknell, scoring a 54–0 victory over a squad from that college in nearby Lewisburg.

  A five-hundred-seat grandstand was erected in 1893 to accommodate spectators at the on-campus field where the football team practiced and played. With increased popularity came increased competition. Soon schools were eschewing some of the long-accepted guidelines of amateurism in their desire for victories. Penn State hired its first paid coach, George Hoskins, the school’s director of physical training, in 1892.

  Students at the college, whose enrollment in the 1894–95 school year had reached 221 (roughly the size of the village that had grown up around it), began to take notice. Football games increasingly became occasions for excitement and expressions of school spirit. In developing its football traditions, Penn State, like schools elsewhere, looked to the precedents set by Yale, Harvard, Penn, and Princeton, then the big leagues of college sports.

  When Penn State’s baseball team traveled to New Jersey for a game in 1906, junior H. D. “Joe” Mason was captivated by Princeton’s tiger mascot. Returning to campus, Mason fired off a letter to The Lemon, a student publication, suggesting Penn State adopt a lion as its symbol. The choice would be appropriate, he stressed, because mountain lions had roamed the nearby hills as recently as the 1880s. Mason’s suggestion caught on instantly. And since the most prominent of those mountains was Mount Nittany, its name quickly was appended to Lions.

  Playing the kind of East-dominated schedule that would remain a fixture through the Paterno years, the Nittany Lions teams were up and down through the first few decades of the twentieth century. But then, as now, the alumni demanded victories. When Bob Higgins’s team went 2–8 in 1931, with five shutout losses, the outcry was tremendous. “No boy wis
hes to become part of an institution which is a target of jokes and ridicule,” wrote Charles Heppenstall, a nineteenth-century Penn State player, in a letter to the Alumni News that year.

  Even then, debates raged about the nature of the program. Across the nation, football’s excesses, as detailed in the scathing 1929 Carnegie Report on American College Athletics, were widely understood though still largely unregulated. While some schools adhered to the amateur concept, others ran barely disguised professional operations. In the absence of any binding national guidelines, Penn State vacillated between the two models.

  In 1900, its board of trustees had authorized scholarships for athletes who had been at the school at least a year, making Penn State one of the first colleges to do so. Later, responding to various criticisms from reformers or boosters, the number would be reduced or raised again.

  Penn State football provided one of the incidents those opposed to big-time football liked to reference. In October of 1902, Andrew Smith played for the Nittany Lions in a 17–0 loss at the University of Pennsylvania. He apparently played well enough to impress his opponents, because two days later he was practicing with Pennsylvania’s team in Philadelphia. He played three more games for Penn State before transferring to Penn. Smith earned all-American status at Penn in 1904, then dropped out of school.

  “We go out after men for the sake of baseball and football, offering all sorts of inducements,” said W. H. Andrews, the chancellor of Allegheny College, not long after Penn State had beaten that Pennsylvania school’s team, 50–0, in 1904. “It isn’t a thing unknown among us for a man to go from the football team of one college to the football team of another in midseason. Scholarships are offered to promising players. Professionalism is winked at.”

  Eventually, in response to the Carnegie Report, Penn State did away with all athletic scholarships, a move that pleased some alumni but angered others who saw it as an unnecessary overreaction.